ABSTRACT
One of the most persistent themes among intellectuals since the Enlightenment has been the belief that modern society is in a state of crisis - at a crossroads in its evolution. It will either realize the full measure of hope that technological, economic, and political progress has long promised, or (more likely) suffer decline at the hand of unforeseen forces that progress itself unleashed. To be sure, themes of crisis, malaise, and decline have been so widely promulgated that one wonders whether this conviction is not also a conceit, for nearly every generation of intellectuals since that time has made the claim that its generation is the decisive one. In one sense it is irrelevant whether the various claims have any basis in reality. Merely the fact that they are made repeatedly and with such passion is significant. At the broadest level it signals an almost universal perception that modernization has not come without severe, long-lasting and perhaps calamitous costs.
